The use of solvents and organic water-soluble synthetic detergents at low levels for cleaning glass are known.
General purpose household cleaning compositions for hard surfaces such as metal, glass, ceramic, plastic and linoleum surfaces, are commercially available in both powdered and liquid form. Liquid detergent compositions are disclosed in Australian Pat. Application 82/88168, filed Sep. 9, 1982, by The Procter & Gamble Company; U.K. Pat. Application GB 2,166,153A, filed Oct. 24, 1985, by The Procter & Gamble Company; and U.K. Pat. Application GB 2,160,887A, filed Jun. 19, 1985, by Bristol-Myers Company, all of said published applications being incorporated herein by reference. These liquid detergent compositions comprise certain organic solvents, surfactant, and optional builder and/or abrasive. The prior art, however, fails to teach, or recognize, the advantage of the specific organic solvents/buffers disclosed hereinafter, in liquid hard surface cleaner formulations.
Liquid cleaning compositions have the great advantage that they can be applied to hard surfaces in neat or concentrated form so that a relatively high level of surfactant material and organic solvent is delivered directly to the soil. Moreover, it is a rather more straightforward task to incorporate high concentrations of anionic or nonionic surfactant in a liquid rather than a granular composition. For both these reasons, therefore, liquid cleaning compositions have the potential to provide superior soap scum, grease, and oily soil removal over powdered cleaning compositions.
Nevertheless, liquid cleaning compositions, and especially compositions prepared for cleaning glass, still suffer a number of drawbacks which can limit their consumer acceptability. Thus, they frequently contain little or no detergency builder salts and consequently they tend to have poor cleaning performance on particulate soil and also lack "robustness" at high water hardness levels. In addition, they can suffer problems of product form, in particular, inhomogeneity, lack of clarity, or inadequate viscosity characteristics, or excessive "solvent" odor for consumer use.
The object of the present invention is to provide detergent compositions which provide good cleaning for the usual general hard surface cleaning tasks found in the house including the removal of hard to remove greasy soils from counter tops and stoves and, preferably, at the same time provide good glass cleaning without excessive filming and/or streaking.